The need for heart transplants will always exceed the number of donor hearts available for transplant. Thanks to research just out from Massachusetts General Hospital, though, this may not continue to be a problem for much longer.

Getting the right blood to the right person at the time remains as a great a challenge as ever. New plans to grow fresh blood in lab, and use it in patients are taking shape in the English health care system.

A new company known as Biplastiq plans to offer a radical new medical treatment. The technology uses genetically-transformed mitochondria that can be activated with light to provide additional energy where cells need it most.

A female patient in the US has grown a nose on her back following a failed experimental stem cell treatment that was intended to cure her paralysis. The nose-like growth, which was producing a ‘thick mucus-like material,’ has recently been removed as it was pressing painfully on her spine. If you ever needed an example of the potential perils of stem cell therapy, and just how little we actually know about the function of stem cells, this is it.

New research, just published in the journal Cell Reports, suggests that sperm cells can be created in the lab from skin cells. What this really means is that the limitations to further progress in the science of cloning and stem cells are no longer scientific or technological in nature. Instead, the limits have become the problem of a new kind of engineering — ethical engineering.

Controversy has surrounded both the ethics and methods of stem cell research. Researchers have just succeeded in returning adult skin cells to a virgin stem cell state which can then be made into nearly any tissue.

A series of papers just published in Nature describes a simple procedure for shocking cells back into an embryonic state where they can be quickly retrained to become virtually any cell type in the body.

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